A US government-funded survey has found that Americans with higher levels of scientific and mathematical knowledge are more sceptical regarding the dangers of climate change than their more poorly educated fellow citizens.
The results of the survey are especially remarkable as it was plainly not intended to show any such thing …

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Another week another LP or AO climate change denial article. As usual if bored you can find the obvious flaws and or bad journalism in the article or more likely just skip over the obvious opinion piece giving it the Utterly terrible article ranking it deserves.

That's not true at all, we have accurate measurements of how much the climate is changing. Despite that there are plenty of deniers of the hockey stick graph, which was confimed by the recent BEST study. And in evey climate thread on here there is at least someone who claims it got colder in the last 10 years or that all those scientists somehow forgot to take the solar cycle into account...

The hockey stick controversy is very political and all but just stating outright lies to win your argument is a punk ass move.

BEST Conclusions:

Global temperatures closely matched previous studies from NASA GISS, NOAA and the Hadley Centre, that have found global warming trends. The Berkely Earth group estimates that over the past 50 years the land surface warmed by 0.911°C, just 2% less than NOAA’s estimate. The team scientific director stated that "...this confirms that these studies were done carefully and that potential biases identified by climate change sceptics did not seriously affect their conclusions."

"That's not true at all, we have accurate measurements of how much the climate is changing."

Uhm, accurate measurements?

How? Where?

Many of those measuring stations was originally in the outskirts somewhere. As cities have grown, a significant number of these are now in urban areas.

Yes, human activity affects the temperature measured... But that is unimportant. The claim is that our release of CO2 causes the climate to change catastrophically. So far there is no proof of that.

Meanwhile we have lost focus on toxic NOx emissions (that can be easily felt on your own body if you visit a city where the majority drives cars fueled by diesel), nor do anyone care about toxic waste dumping in third-world countries.

And before you bring up tree rings, riddle me this: How come a narrow ring band is interpreted as a decrease in temperature? If you heat up the climate signficantly, will these trees grow even more? Doubtful, isn't it?

>Many of those measuring stations was originally in the outskirts somewhere. As cities have grown, a significant number of these are now in urban areas.

The old urban heat island fallacy eh?

The urban heat island effect and poor station quality did not bias the results obtained from earlier studies carried out by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Hadley Centre and NASA's GISS Surface Temperature Analysis. The team found that the urban heat island effect is locally large and real, but does not contribute significantly to the average land temperature rise, as the planet's urban regions amount to less than 1% of the land area. The study also found that while stations considered "poor" might be less accurate, they recorded the same average warming trend.

I would argue that human released CO2 is a big problem but will agree its not the only gas we need to worry about. Methane is actually a far stronger greenhouse gas and the increase in world livestock is not good either. The quickest way probably to arrest global warming maybe to all become vegans but then again who the fucks wants to do that? Make the third world do it, more of them lol.

Accurate measurements as in lots of weather and CO2 level monitoring stations, satellites measuring solar activity, earth albedo and IR emissions, polar ice coverage and height, global ocean levels etc. If you want to call these measurements inaccurate or biased then you've got to show convincing evidence. Merely alluding to heat island effect doesn't do it as it only affects a small subset of monitoring stations and is already corrected for (obviously).

The fact that CO2 acts as a greenhouse gas is irrefutable. Releasing huge amounts of greenhouse gasses in a short timeframe so that CO2 sinks and other feedbacks cannot keep up will cause catastrophic climate change. A 2-3 degree temperature rise is already unavoidable, so you will experience yourself how bad that turns out to be for humankind.

Modern diesels are very clean, and all cars are regularly tested to conform to strict emission limits. As a result air quality has improved dramatically in the last 30 years. However to get a much larger reduction you'd have to use electric or plug-in hybrids in town, improving efficiency, moving most emissions outside the city and allowing them to be filtered at the power station.

All chemical reactions slow down with decreasing temperature, so tree rings become narrower as the tree grows more slowly. This only applies if it doesn't get too hot or too cold for the tree to survive.

The hockey stick has been proved reliable time and time again, even to the extent of revealing that nasa didn't always know where and when their satellites were.

it's well past tiresome how the CC science remains pretty consistent, while the deniers keep on having to radically rethink and reinvent their gobshite to preserve their meme.

this long since ceased to be a matter of science and has passed into the realm of the political, at which point, given the entrenched views of the deniers, further debate is pointless, lewis believes what lewis believes and there is literally nothing that anyone anywhere is ever going to say that is going to move him on this.

Santorum: There is no such thing as global warming. It is, in my opinion, there are hundreds of factors that cause the Earth to warm and cool, and the trace gas — of which human participation in this trace gas — is …

>The ONLY argument is about how much it's changing, and what—if anything—needs to be done about it.

Very reasonable and correct but unfortunately that is not the only argument among the rich and powerful here in The United States of Corporate Whores. In fact the right has become so anti intellectual that a significant number of its membership still doesn't believe natural selection is real or the earth is more than 5000 years old.

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I long ago quit reading Lewis climate articles as they always cherry pick one sentence in some report and ignore all the caveats. I just like reminding every one to down vote his climate crap so perhaps he will write more about some of his other topics that are far more entertaining. As for AO his articles almost always suck and often he doesn't allow comments for a good reason so downvoting him is seldom even worth the time.

Re: Should have kept the serfs illiterate

Yep and cultures who have pushed most for this have floundered and been conquerored or made irrelevant by cultures better educated with bigger guns. There is a good reason why Islam makes up over %20 of the world's population but accounts for less than %5 of the world's wealth.

Re: Should have kept the serfs illiterate

%5 of the world's wealth.

???

not counting oil reserves i guess.

and for another thing what about your average thick as pigshit american christian fundamentalist? they would appear to make up the majority of the american electorate (it it NOT possible to get elected to high office in the US without going to church every Sunday), so shouldn't uncle sam be included in your count too?

Re: Should have kept the serfs illiterate

>not counting oil reserves i guess.

Nope those are included and its the only reason its not even lower. Commodities even ones as valuable as oil and gold in the grand scheme of GDP are a very small part for a modern industrial country. Its IP and or turning commodities into finished products where the real money is.

>pigshit american christian fundamentalist? they would appear to make up the majority of the american electorate

Nah only in the bottom ten states in income which are all red states and are mostly in the South. The just seem like the majority because they scream so loud.

Re: Should have kept the serfs illiterate

Harvard, Princeton, Yale, etc, etc, etc. I bet the Christian founders of those schools would object to your comments.

When several reformers were burned at the stake because they wanted the Bible in "the language of the people", they took a stand on education that showed a conviction that you simply don't have.

The biggest irony here is that the education that they originally sought to provide everyone, is the same education you are proving to have rejected to learn. You don't want to learn, your opinion supersedes anything you could possibly be taught, so you reject learning in favor of opinion.

In the same way, this article just proves that both opposing views will use the evidence to support their view, and call anyone who opposes that view wrong, stupid or ignorant, rather than setting aside their agenda, and critically assessing both sides.

Re: Should have kept the serfs illiterate

Stop press: Educated people familiar with scientific method are more cynical.

Isn't that the FREAKING POINT of it?!

Scientific method teaches us to be cynical and require evidence. That's why people with brains don't want to heal the planet with magic crystals.

Where's the story, Lewis?

Stop press: Lewis Page jumps on any available soap box to write an opinion piece vaguely based on some news and liberally scattered with some of the most biased weasel-words I've seen in a news article since AO's last opinion piece.

Re: Should have kept the serfs illiterate

woah there! ...

Half way into the article and what I've gleened from it is..

These sociologists or whatever, have found out that people who know real science think climate change is maybe a bit overhyped.. and from this they have not drawn the conclusion that climate change is maybe a bit overhyped, they have instead pulled from their primary communications orrifices this notion that real scientists are all biased?

What's more they have decided the best answer is class-targeted propoganda?

To top it off I can only assume they think they know better than those of us who can do real science, that sceptical decisions are bad and that lying is the right thing to do, to save us from ourselves.

Re: woah there! ...

Now, maybe you'll agree Lewis' headline should have been "The more science you know, the less worried you are about climate ... if you're an NRA member".

So the main finding of the paper is that political orientation is actually a bigger factor in determining your view on climate change than education. Even educated people have a tendency to read scientific papers through tinted glasses, and pick out those parts that support their own *pre-conceived ideas*. Who would have thunk? Perhaps even El Reg hacks have a tendency to do just that.

@Dave 62 -- Re: woah there! ...

Ok, I've read the Nature article. Irrespective of whether editorial has a slant one way or the other, several issues stand out:

1, The more one knows about science the more one questions simple existential statements about scientific matters that don't also have rigorous scientific underpinnings; and the more extraordinary scientific claims are then the more rigorous the underpinnings 'proofs' have to be. (It used to be this way and this is how it should be.)

2. I'm not the slightest bit surprised with the results of this survey. In fact--from all the reports in the media in recent times--I'd thought the scientifically-literate had gone a bit bonkers, but it seems all's well with most of world's techies. (Note: here, I'm not discussing climate change per se, rather how scientific literacy affects one's perceptions and understanding of natural events.)

3. It seems to me that the surveyed phenomenon isn't limited to just climate change but rather it also applies to many things. For example, in recent years, reports hyped up by an ignorant press have made the lay public terribly fearful of chemicals and nuclear materials etc. Consequently, there's almost no rational debate anymore: from the frenzy that follows industrial accidents one could be forgiven for thinking that say a spill of sodium hydroxide was as dangerous as an equal quantity of dioxin, similarly if a small alpha particle source goes missing then you'd think from reports that a few kilos of gamma-radiating cobalt-60 had been dropped into a lunchtime crowd--hysterical reactions seem to be the norm. Today, for many who've been taught science, it's nevertheless clear from their reactions to scientific phenomena, that they've gained little or no hands-on feel for the subject. This ought to be of considerable concern. (The reasons why it's so are vast subjects in and of themselves.)

4. That psychologists and sociologists are now very concerned that the social engineering--brainwashing--hasn't been working as expected and that they're 'reevaluating' how this can be remedied is extremely disturbing. The postmodernists have just about already won round one with their arguments that there are no absolutes [read acceptable standards and such], to the extent that much of society prefers to listen to their frightening unreasoned mumbo-jumbo rather than to trust in scientific logic and the scientific method. Their concern over how 'social engineering' has escaped them and how a rethink is needed to recapture it, to me, seems likely to be the beginning of round two. This I consider to be an extremely worrying development and one that needs to be fought at all costs by all rationally-thinking people.

@I think so I am? -- Yuh better stick around.

You had better stick around.

Walking away from the issues and leaving them to the social 'sciences' to resolve is what too many scientists and engineers have done for the past 35-40 years (and definitely so from the Reagan-Thatcher era).

In the absence of a decent fight from us scientists, engineers and techies--a fight we'd easily win with a bit of determination--then this rabble of scaredy-cat doomsayers, mumbo-jumbo artists and woolly-thinking postmodernists will have us all catapulting back into the dark Ages.

Skepticism does not mean doubt

I am skeptical about all 'facts' with which I am presented (I hope I am, with a bit of advance notice and sober), to a lesser or greater degree. My skepticism about evolution is .000001%, my skepticism about the existence of a deity is 99.9999%. As I don't believe anything 100%, which would require faith, there is always the possibility that new evidence could alter or negate a held understanding. I assume this is part of the scientific mind-set: one is prepared to accept indefiniteness.

Re: Skepticism does not mean doubt

In many ways I have to agree that this seems the most plausible explanation: Those of a scientific mindset understand things and express themselves in different ways to those without.

For example, to take your deity example, a non-scientific person may say they think there is absolutely no chance of a deity existing. A person with a science background would think about it and say that they think there is a negligible chance of a deity existing.

To a lay-person these would sound the same, but the "scientist" is leaving the door open to the chance, even though they don't think the chance is large enough to make any difference.

Re: Skepticism does not mean doubt

The question posed in their study was:

"How much risk do you believe climate change poses to human health, safety or prosperity?"

This is important. It's perfectly possible to believe that climate change is happening, and even that it may have large consequences for many people, but not be concerned about the risks because those are minimal from the point of view of a wealthy westerner. In other words the question is not about being sceptical of the science, but of the risks posed by the situation. Two different things.

Re: Skepticism does not mean doubt

""How much risk do you believe climate change poses to human health, safety or prosperity?""

If that's the actual question asked in the paper, then it doesn't even equate to AGW. Few, if any, skeptics of AGW argue that the climate does not change. We debate whether and how much human activity is responsible for it. Someone who devoutly believed that CO2 was a minor contributor and that Climate Change was primarily driven by solar activity, would still be as much included as someone who 100% believed in AGW.

Similarly, a number of people make supportable arguments that a small global rise in temperatures of 2-3C would have an overall beneficial effect, increasing arable land, for example. Such people might be sincere believers in AGW and have very low concern. If their paper is intended to assess doubt / faith in AGW (which their entire conclusion about how to convince people to be more alarmed about climate change implies), then the question is very badly thought out.